— Writer-director Terrence Malick wasn't there to accept it, but "The Tree of Life," his ambitious and long-anticipated examination of what it all means, won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or on Sunday night.

Leroy Collins never says anything about it. He never tells his neighbors he was once a movie star — once.
Collins is 89 and lives by himself in the Montgomery Place retirement community in Hyde Park. Scientists who worked on the Manhattan...